


What Happens in Miami

by Suaine



Category: Veep
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:20:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601210
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Suaine/pseuds/Suaine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens in Miami, stays in Miami... or does it? Dan and Amy wake up after a night of heavy drinking and things get complicated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What Happens in Miami

**Author's Note:**

  * For [withthepilot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/withthepilot/gifts).



Dan woke up at 8:34a.m. to drawn blinds – an unassuming but tasteful hotel pattern – a taste like a small animal died in his mouth and the insistent pounding of a hangover headache at the back of his skull. As mornings went, it wasn't altogether a disaster and he was cautiously optimistic about his day.

That was until he stretched his aching limbs and saw the gaudy fucking ring on his finger.

-

Amy had been hyperventilating for about twenty minutes in the bathroom, after waking up next to Dan's stupidly smug sleep face, when she noticed. Her freak-out immediately ceased because it was one thing to hate-fuck a co-worker away from the prying eyes of the Hill, but getting drunk married at a DOMA summit was just too much of a story.

If there was one thing Amy was good at though, it was creative damage control. This wasn't nearly as bad as pretending to be torn up about her imaginary abortion, feeling used and guilty and like she owed Selina something even while she hated her a little. The situation did come in above the whole tear-jerker thing in the running for most fucked, largely because that one had been Mike's fault, but it was manageable.

She checked her least favorite blogs first, people who knew her name and had a serious grudge. Middle-aged men who reported on Washington and the places of power because they couldn't get anyone to vote for them if they tried and had a bone to pick with people like her and Selina for being female and considerably more attractive than the general congress – those people loved to tear her to shreds for all the wrong reasons. They'd have a field day with this sort of thing. Then she checked the angry feminists, hoping not to find the same screeds. Too often what she did earned her the ire of both and the latter Amy actually kind of cared about.

-

Dan stared at the ceiling and tried to asphyxiate himself with the power of his mind.

-

The problem was, of course, that everyone had a fucking twitter and instagram these days, sharing their daily lives in excruciatingly boring detail, slapping a vintage filter on top and calling it being social. What it really boiled down to was not just one but over a dozen different photos of Amy and Dan's hilarious nuptials splashed all over the internet. From what she could see, Amy was glad she hadn't ended up chained to Jonah, and not for lack of trying. But drunk!Dan was surprisingly ferocious about his territory, when usually she thought of him as a bit of a lap dog.

Speaking of, she probably should go and check if he'd rolled out of bed yet. Amy didn't remember last night in any kind of detail, but she did remember that sex with Dan was fun, if not worth the fact that it was sex with _Dan_.

-

Dan had rolled on the floor.

-

Amy stared at her face in the mirror, nodded, and went out to war.

Then she stopped short and sighed when she saw Dan. “Oh my god, you're pathetic.”

The annoying thing about Dan was that once he'd seen her naked that one, ill-advised time, he thought they had some kind of understanding. Amy had an understanding alright, most of it centered on kicking his balls both metaphorically and literally. Dan annoyed her. Dan was smarmy and fake and would do anything to get ahead.

Dan perked up at the sound of her voice. “Thank god,” he groaned.

Amy crossed her arms, wary at the sound of relief in his voice. “What?”

“I'm not married to Mike.”

Okay, she had to admit, that one would have thrown her, too. “That's not happening, or were you not paying attention at all the last week?” The DOMA summit was a thinly veiled campaign event, but it did bring together assholes from all over the country who thought they should know better than their constituents who they should marry. Amy looked at Dan's tousled hair and slight smirk and wondered if the conservative nutjobs weren't on to something there.

“Not yet,” Dan said, eyebrows wiggling suggestively. “Selina came out in favor of equality yesterday. It was a good day.”

So, first of all, Amy was a little thrown that Dan actually seemed to care. Not that he didn't have his pet issues, but usually he hid them behind walls of sarcasm and butt-licking. Second, though, he looked so happy, like maybe he was capable of actual feelings for more than two minutes at a time in a private and secure location. Amy tried to ignore it.

“I'm surprised, Dan. What's with the face? And the whole,” she waved her hand around, “caring... thing.”

Dan frowned, still on the floor. “I can care about things.” He sounded a bit petulant and Amy, god help her, was charmed. She thought of puppies and wagging tails and slobbery tongues.

“Of course you can,” she said as she crouched next to him and patted his hair.

“Why do I feel like you're making fun of me?”

Amy grinned. “Because I am, and I think you're still a little drunk.” But then she remembered why she'd finally come out of the bathroom. “Dan, I need your help. Technically, we both do.”

Suddenly, naked except for his batman boxer briefs, Dan was all business. “We have a situation?”

Amy shrugged. “We are a situation.”

-

Dan stared at the picture of Jonah trying to grab Amy's ass while hanging on to a bottle of illegal rum, Sue looking unimpressed and wicked with a cellphone in her hand. Sue wasn't the one who had leaked the images, that dubious honor went to Gary, whose only chance at survival was that he'd been just as drunk as the rest of them.

They'd gone viral. The blogosphere hated Amy in ways it had never taken notice of Dan and now he was caught in her gravitational pull of suck. “Why do they even care? This is fucking ridiculous. We're not anyone. Fuck.”

He ran a frustrated hand through his hair and backspaced from another gleeful, asshole-ish post speculating that Amy was either a washed-out whore or a bimbo sleeping herself up the political totem pole, betting on Dan's forward trajectory. He felt a little sick, despite himself.

Amy rolled her neck and sighed. “Never mind what they're saying, it's too big to deny and the pictures are too damn detailed. We're married in the eyes of the voting public.”

Which was, technically, much worse than being married in the eyes of the law. They couldn't just go and get an annulment for a spur of the moment wedding after attending a summit to argue whether queer folks deserved this most sacred of unions. Fuck. It would make them look like the worst kind of assholes.

“What if we play it like a demonstration on why the sanctity of marriage is a terrible argument? A stunt marriage. I could probably get my cousin Steve to-”

Shaking her head, Amy actually reached out and sealed her palm over his mouth like a vise. “Do you want to be the one rebutting the rebuttal when they point out that we were obviously drunk and didn't fucking know what we were doing? There are pictures of me throwing up in the aisle.”

Dan deflated a little. “We could say we were drinking for courage.”

“Yeah, because you'll be the one they'll say needed courage. I'm not going to be that butt of that joke, Dan.”

“So what then? What do we do?”

Amy swallowed and sat back, a steely glint in her eyes. “We order room service for breakfast, take some suggestive photos of our clothes on the floor and hope to god people will believe we're actually in love.”

Dan's eyes widened. “You want to play it straight?”

“I know it's hard for you,” Amy said, grinning, “what with your tendency to bend over and take it if you believe it'll get you ahead, but it's probably the best way to go. In a couple of months no one is going to give a damn if we quietly split.”

“You can't be serious.” Dan felt the blood leave his face. She couldn't be serious.

Amy crossed her arms and cocked her head. “I'm not torpedoing my career over someone's drunk shenanigans, Dan. I may have been conned into sleeping with you – again! – and even saying yes when some provincial priest asked me about the 'til death do us part thing, but I'm not giving up on helping Selina make a difference in the world just because I can't hold my liquor.”

The thing was, Dan didn't feel nearly as panicked about being married to Amy as he should. Sure, he probably wouldn't be having any sex for the foreseeable future, but there were worse people to trick the US public with. Amy got the core of him – how he had values he wasn't too proud to compromise to get shit done. She liked to call it his shriveled, black corpse of a soul.

-

“Okay,” Dan said, and Amy didn't know what to do with that at all. She'd been prepared for whining and loud fights and maybe angry sex, but this was weirder.

“Okay?”

Dan nodded. “Okay. We'll give it six months, do some couple-y shit. Whatever. It's not a big deal.”

Amy blinked. She wasn't sure this wasn't some kind of trick, like the suicide pact of yore. But Dan looked sincere, which for him meant a kind of demented grin and eyebrow raised like a fuck-you. Wow. Okay. She could work with that.

Relief flooded her. “Oh. Fuck. I could totally kiss you right now-”

Then Dan did something even weirder. He leaned close, smiled at her and pressed their lips together.

Amy kissed back. Dan was at least good at this, and after everything she deserved to remember one good thing about her last day in Miami.


End file.
